Quotes from William Faulkner

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

I give it (grandfather's watch) to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.

I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping.

My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin.

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright er not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat.

He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, "I better move. I better get away from here." But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.

Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism--unless the criticized isn't within earshot.